Bang on a Can

[7/4]

New Works That Employ or Disregard Electronics By ALLAN KOZINN, NY Times

Bang on a Can's People's Commissioning Fund is a lovely idea. Concertgoers contribute whatever they can afford, and Bang on a Can, the new-music organization, commissions a few new works, usually from young composers. The scores are played by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at an annual concert and recorded for broadcast on WNYC-FM.

That's the theory, anyway, and it's mostly what happens. But the fine print in the program book shows that the grass-roots ideal is not easily reached. After the long list of contributors, the Greenwall Foundation and the Jerome Foundation are also thanked for their support. Not that there's any shame in that; it always seemed unlikely that a few hundred small contributions could yield decent commissioning fees.

This year's crop — works by Tristan Perich, Erdem Helvacioglu and Ken Thomson — were performed on Wednesday evening at Merkin Concert Hall.

Mr. Perich and Mr. Helvacioglu provided works that mixed electronic sound and standard (although amplified) instruments. Mr. Thomson, the saxophonist in the punk-jazz band Gutbucket, wrote a virtuoso piece for the ensemble itself, with no electronic overlay.

In Mr. Perich's "All Possible Paths," the electronic component had the sharp-edged, undulating quality of the Farfisa organ in Philip Glass's music from the 1970s, and the ensemble's moves were the insistently repeating figures that drove Mr. Glass's early music as well. Harmonic movement was glacial until a long coda in which everything stopped except a gentle electronic sound playing a chord progression rather than single-chord repetition.

Mr. Helvacioglu built the electronic track for his "Lossada Taka" by processing recordings of the Bang on a Can players and adding other elements as well: at one point, a woman's voice. His writing was less overtly Minimalist than Mr. Perich's. Instead he created a hazy, atmospheric sound in which the ensemble wove guitar, clarinet, piano, percussion and bass lines in a stream of brief, varied and mostly disconnected episodes.

Mr. Thomson's "seasonal disorder" is a high-energy, angry work, inspired by reading the news every morning before composing. Mr. Thomson's alarm yielded a texture laced with power chords, screaming clarinet lines and cluster-laden piano writing. In the end it is sheer madness, in a good, thrillingly visceral way.

In the second half of the concert the Czech violinist and singer Iva Bittova offered an invitingly quirky vocal and violin improvisation, and was joined by the Bang on a Can players for her song cycle "Elida." Ms. Bittova gave the musicians plenty to do, but her riveting singing — which ranges from rough-hewn rusticity to eccentric leaping in the style of Kate Bush — remained the focus of the performance.

The commissioned works by Tristan Perich, Erdem Helvacioglu and Ken Thomson will be broadcast on March 19 on "New Sounds," WNYC, 93.9 FM; wnyc.org.

Edited June 2, 2008 by 7/4

[papsrus]

Interesting. Thanks for posting. Hopefully I'll remember to tune in March 19.

[Christiern]

When I ran WBAI, in the 1960s, we carried a wonderful weekly BBC concert series devoted to avant garde music. These were recordings of live concerts, each of which began with a traditional classical composition, played as written. There were some highly inventive compositions in the series and I liked much of it. One was called "1812" (I may have the number wrong) and consisted entirely of that many hand claps. That, of course, was a bit gimmicky, but most of the music was very serious and, I thought, worthwhile.

While at WBAI, I had the good fortune to meet Bruce Haack, an extraordinary man who was way ahead of his time. There were no home computers back then (around 1965), but Bruce had two cheap Viking tape decks and an incredible imagination. He had neither studied electronics nor music, but he married the two with astounding imagination. When he first called me, he told me that he never missed my Saturday midnight show, "The Inside," and that he taped it and watched it regularly. When I reminded him that it was a radio show, he invited me to come to his apartment and watch it.

What I saw would not raise any eyebrows today, but it was sensational 43 years ago. The audio tape fed into a big RCA color set and every sound contributed to ever evolving colors and patterns. Then Bruce hooked some wires to a friend's arms, legs and body, and when that guy danced, his movements created the music. It was akin to the Theramin that I remembered seeing demonstrated at my school in England 20 years earlier, but far more sophisticated--and it all came out of a couple of shoe boxes filled with wires, resistors, etc. A tangled mess from which he created magic.

A few years later, Columbia put out an album by Bruce, "The Electric Lucifer," but Moog was doing his thing by then, so the awe I felt in '65 was diminished. Bruce also wrote and performed many children's songs, which he issued on his own LP label.

[Hoppy T. Frog]

That's awesome, Chris. I really like what little of Haack's stuff I've heard. There's also a video documentary on him, but I haven't seen it yet.

[7/4]

June 2, 2008

Music Review | Bang on a Can Marathon

Festival’s 21st Birthday Celebration Blurs Boundaries, Dusk Till Dawn

By STEVE SMITH, NYT

Musical calendar watchers love the seeming portent of anniversaries that end in a zero or a five. But in America, turning 21 is meaningful, too. It’s an age that comes with a certain implied license to go a bit crazy, to take risks, maybe even to lose control for a while. Perhaps that explains what was by all accounts a first for the Bang on a Can Marathon, which began in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center on Saturday night: a mosh pit.

The unlikely occurrence took place during a frenetic 4:15 a.m. performance on Sunday by Dan Deacon, a Baltimore rock musician known as an exuberant, crowd-pleasing one-man band. Maniacally bouncing young bodies crashed into one another with gleeful abandon. A few brave souls body-surfed atop outstretched hands.

Bang on a Can has long included performers from outside contemporary classical circles in its annual marathons, both to blur musical boundaries and to lure new audiences. If it has never seen a response like this one, well, no one else is quite like Mr. Deacon.

Normally the center of attention (and often planted amid audience members), here he was a ghost in the machine, controlling the booming, buzzing electronic patterns of his “Ultimate Reality Part 3” from a hidden position. Onstage two rock drummers, Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman, bashed tribal rhythms in tandem; overhead on a video screen, scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger films split and morphed into psychedelic swirls.

Mr. Deacon’s geeky hedonism — all 15 minutes’ worth — was a high point of the 12-hour event, which Bang on a Can produced in collaboration with the mostly pop-oriented River to River Festival and arts>World Financial Center. Two other performers from alternative-rock circles also attracted their own retinues. The most polarizing, to judge by comments afterward, was the guitarist Marnie Stern, who blissfully strummed raucous chords and tapped spidery solos over a piercing looped drone.

Some observers proclaimed Ms. Stern’s performance unbearable. I found her intensity oddly seductive if you could get past the resemblance of her sound to that of a swarm of bees amplified by a tinny P.A. system in a crowded gymnasium.

Of greater general appeal was Owen Pallett, a Canadian singer and violinist whose work under the name Final Fantasy mixes swords-and-sorcery imagery with a vulnerable gay sensibility. Mr. Pallett played three of his songs during a powerful 10 p.m. set by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. He then joined the group in “Twelve Polearms,” a fanciful commissioned work that wavered between sweetness and suspense.

Those performers aside, the marathon mostly presented new iterations of familiar themes. The vibrant chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound kicked off the proceedings at 6 p.m. with a movement from John Adams’s “Son of Chamber Symphony,” and much later offered a staggeringly creative arrangement of the Beatles’ abstract sound collage “Revolution 9,” arranged by Matt Marks. Signal, a new chamber orchestra, made an auspicious New York debut at midnight with a powerful account of Steve Reich’s “Daniel Variations.”

Musicians from around the world attested to the global reach of the Bang on a Can aesthetic. Crash Ensemble, from Ireland, played colorful works by Donnacha Dennehy, its founder, and Terry Riley, as well as an overlong exploration of altered intonation and hammering rhythms by Arnold Dreyblatt. Ensemble Nikel, a quartet from Tel Aviv, brought pieces by Chaya Czernowin, Sivan Cohen Elias and Ruben Seroussi, which, though filled with fascinating spurts and bursts, had little shape or momentum.

Bang on a Can’s founders — Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang — were each represented by a striking piece. The solo vocalists Pamela Z, Caleb Burhans and Bora Yoon fashioned attractive and deeply personal creations using electronic effects.

As dawn approached, the Canadian ensemble Contact presented a faithful arrangement of Brian Eno’s meditative electronic piece, “Discreet Music.” The marathon concluded with a 5:30 a.m. performance of Stockhausen’s “Stimmung,” sung with intense concentration by the sextet Toby Twining Music as the sun rose. High overhead, birds perched on wires near the ceiling chirped a lively counterpoint. Whether in protest or in appreciation was anyone’s guess.

[7/4]

review...

.

[7/4]

Alex Ross

.

[7/4]

Mass MoCA: Bang on a Can Marathon

Time flies when it's all fun

By Richard Houdek, Special to The Eagle

Article Last Updated: 07/29/2008 09:57:24 AM EDT

Tuesday, July 29

NORTH ADAMS — Bang on a Can's trove of music was so rich that the annual festival's customary six-hour Marathon Saturday evening at Mass MoCA suddenly became a seven-hour event.

And the throng on hand couldn't have been happier. By the time the last item on the program rolled around — two classics by Frank Zappa, after 10:30 — much of the crowd that earlier had nearly filled the museum's Hunter Center for the Performing Arts remained for the final standing ovation.

Terry Riley was the special guest, and the celebrated composer, involved in three of the evening's significant numbers, doubtlessly was the major drawing card.

Riley led the procession of instrumentalists in a clangorous percussion march to the stage before the players assumed their normal positions, and instruments, for the performance of his "Woelfli Portraits." This was a concert version of portions of a chamber opera based on the work of Adolf Woelfli, the artist and poet who learned to express himself while confined to a Swiss asylum for the insane for 35 years, until his death in 1930.

Illustrated with projected quirky drawings by Woelfli of animals, fish and other objects in color, the music in four movements, ranged from solemn, including lovely figurations from Lauren Radnofsky's cello to a playful ragtime pastiche from the piano, courtesy Vicki Ray, and staccato chords in the finale from everyone.

Riley's "Olsen III," originally a 53-minute undertaking for orchestra, chorus and his own soprano saxophone, was pared to 13 minutes of minimalist tension, with four singers offering insistent syllabic commentary in unison, occasionally in contrast, with the instrumental ensemble of nine. In attenuating solo turns, Evan Ziporyn alternated subterranean bass clarinet and shrieking clarinet timbres.

As promised, Riley returned during the marathon's final segment for an abbreviated session of improvisation, whimsically called "piano bar," in which he became an unofficial member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

With Riley at the keyboard displaying reasonably well-supported baritone sounds, he was joined by Gregg August, double bass; David Cossin, percussion; Todd Reynolds, violin, and Ziporyn, clarinets, all unflappable giants in their own realms, displaying considerable musical acumen in keeping up with Riley's sudden switches in styles and rhythm.

#

But aside from Riley and his music, and Zappa's as well, another highlight was a performance of "Shelter," a newish multi-media work with music by David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, the three founders of Bang on a Can.

"Shelter," the marathon's longest piece — running 65 minutes — concerns nature, the roofs we put over ourselves and much more. Deborah Artman, the work's librettist has characterized the work as evoking "the power and threat of nature, the soaring frontier promise contained in the framing of a new house, the pure aesthetic beauty of blueprints, the sweet architecture of sound and the uneasy vulnerability that underlies even the safety of our sleep."

Originally staged in Germany and New York in 2005 by New York's Ridge Theatre, the presentation here retained Laurie Olinder's visual graphics and Bill Morrison's film to deliver a powerful message about our strengths and vulnerabilities. With each composer responsible for at least two of the eight parts - Lange wrote three - Brad Lubman conducted what also was one of the largest of the evening's ensembles, including three mezzo-sopranos who intoned Artman's texts or vocal sound collages.

The projections were either relevant to the titles of each section, or more abstract statements, as in Lang's opening episode, which has the singers repeating "Before I Enter," the title, before images of figures traversing a long pier with ominously rising ocean tides. Gordon's increasingly fast tempo orchestration, replete with vocal train whistles over a counterpoint of double basses and bassoons for "In the Wind," were complemented with images of an accelerating train ride across the great desert; structural frames were assembled and then disappeared as gradually.

Wolfe's "The Boy Sleeps" introduced what appeared to be a kind of lullaby as night fell in a neighborhood of neatly spaced homes over four seasons, before the image cut to a child in slumber and the score's lullaby turned into more disturbing, finally stridently nightmarish full orchestra territory.

Thunder over North Adams and raindrops on the hall roof offered an ironic prelude to "What We Build," the work's finale, illustrating, with Gordon's resonant score and images of an area of homes heavily flooded, that nature can reclaim its province.

#

The summer's contingent of Bang on a Can fellows joined with several faculty members in the evening's stage filling final ensemble. They gave effective readings to Zappa's "Dog Breath Variations," the composer's jaunty, Prokofievian romp, and "G-Spot Tornado" with its frolicsome samba beat.

The award for most unusual composition goes to Sean Francis Conway's "something makes something something," in which the composer breathes and moans into an aboriginal instrument called the didgeridoo while two assistants, cited as percussionists, inflate balloons to the bursting point, repeatedly. For the record, 11 balloons fell; the percussionists survived.

In more serious enterprises, Lois V Vierk's "Timberline" conjured the grandeur of the High Sierras, Christopher Adler's "Ecstatic Volutions in Neon Haze" offered some definition in a minimalist framework with a shimmering coda; the baritone Jeffrey Gavett delivered a persuasive accounting of Morton Feldman's song "Wind," based on Frank O'Hara's bleak poem, and Ken Thomson epitomized feelings about our world in his turbulent "Seasonal Disorder," a work the composer reportedly began with daily readings of The New York Times.

#

The music of Iannis Xenakis made its first marathon appearance with the otherworldly sounds of his 1975-vintage "N'Shima," and "Donald Crockett's "Whistling in the Dark," a piece in which anxiety and vitality collide, makes a good case for the rhythm of life.

Other works on the program were Judd Greenstein's "GetUp/ Get Down" and two examples of Balinese gamelan music, "Sekar Ginotan," arranged by Wayan Loceng, and "Cu (Ba Li) Bre" by Christine Southworth and Ziporyn.

Were it possible to pipe music into the nearby gallery housing the current Jenny Holzer exhibition, it would have been fun to sprawl across one of those oversized beanbags and just listen to some of these pieces.

#

This year's Marathon, the culmination of Bang on a Can's seventh Mass MoCA summer residency, disclosed an unusually gifted group of fellows, all professional musicians on the upward spiral of success, and all clearly smitten with the music of today.

To some, seven hours of this kind of musical fare may seem a bit much, but it passes all too quickly, as they say, when one is having a good time.